EPSIM - An integrated sequential interindustry model for energy planning: evaluating economic, eletrical, environmental and health dimensions of new power plants

Energy is the input in which modern society depends the most for life standard maintenance besides economic and social activities, however, it is also one of the major sources of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, especially the electric sector, due to a world energy matrix concentrated on oil and coal resources. Hereby, impact analysis is essential for policy making focused on sustainable energy systems, once it provides ex ante evaluations for the diverse effects of new projects, being especially important in relation to large infra-structure investments as power plants. In the Brazilian case, although the current electrical matrix is primarily renewable and has low GHG intensity, the required expansion of generation capacity leads to rediscuss power plants’ alternatives and their externalities. Due to the transient and heterogeneous demand of these projects, economic, environmental, energy and social impacts must be assessed dynamically and spatially. This study proposes a social-environmental economic model, based on Regional Sequential Interindustry Model (SIM) integrated with geoprocessing data, in order to identify economic, pollution and public health impacts in state and county levels for energy planning analysis. Integrating I-O framework with electrical and dispersion models, dose-response functions and GIS data, this model aims to expand policy makers’ scope of analysis and provide an auxiliary tool to assess energy planning scenarios in Brazil. Moreover, a case study for wind power plants in Brazil is performed to illustrate its usage

EPSIM - An integrated sequential interindustry model for energy planning: evaluating economic, eletrical, environmental and health dimensions of new power plants

Energy is the input in which modern society depends the most for life standard maintenance besides economic and social activities, however, it is also one of the major sources of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, especially the electric sector, due to a world energy matrix concentrated on oil and coal resources. Hereby, impact analysis is essential for policy making focused on sustainable energy systems, once it provides ex ante evaluations for the diverse effects of new projects, being especially important in relation to large infra-structure investments as power plants. In the Brazilian case, although the current electrical matrix is primarily renewable and has low GHG intensity, the required expansion of generation capacity leads to rediscuss power plants’ alternatives and their externalities. Due to the transient and heterogeneous demand of these projects, economic, environmental, energy and social impacts must be assessed dynamically and spatially. This study proposes a social-environmental economic model, based on Regional Sequential Interindustry Model (SIM) integrated with geoprocessing data, in order to identify economic, pollution and public health impacts in state and county levels for energy planning analysis. Integrating I-O framework with electrical and dispersion models, dose-response functions and GIS data, this model aims to expand policy makers’ scope of analysis and provide an auxiliary tool to assess energy planning scenarios in Brazil. Moreover, a case study for wind power plants in Brazil is performed to illustrate its usage

EPSIM - A Social-Environmental Regional Sequential Interindustry Economic Model for Energy Planning: Evaluating the Impacts of New Power Plants in Brazil

This study proposes a social-environmental economic model, based on Regional Sequential Interindustry Model (SIM) integrated with geoprocessing data, in order to identify economic, pollution and public health impacts in state and municipality levels for energy planning analysis. Integrating I-O framework with electrical and dispersion models, dose-response functions and GIS data, this model aims to expand policy makers’ scope of analysis and provide an auxiliary tool to assess energy planning scenarios in Brazil both dynamically and spatially. Moreover, a case study for wind power plants in Brazil is performed to illustrate its usage

EPSIM - A Social-Environmental Regional Sequential Interindustry Economic Model for Energy Planning: Evaluating the Impacts of New Power Plants in Brazil

This study proposes a social-environmental economic model, based on Regional Sequential Interindustry Model (SIM) integrated with geoprocessing data, in order to identify economic, pollution and public health impacts in state and municipality levels for energy planning analysis. Integrating I-O framework with electrical and dispersion models, dose-response functions and GIS data, this model aims to expand policy makers’ scope of analysis and provide an auxiliary tool to assess energy planning scenarios in Brazil both dynamically and spatially. Moreover, a case study for wind power plants in Brazil is performed to illustrate its usage

2D Shape Recognition Using Information Theoretic Kernels

In this paper, a novel approach for contour-based 2D shape recognition is proposed, using a recently intro-duced class of information theoretic kernels. This kind of kernels, based on a non-extensive generalization of the classical Shannon information theory, are defined on probability measures. In the proposed approach, chain code representations are first extracted from the contours; then n-gram statistics are computed and used as input to the information theoretic kernels. We tested different versions of such kernels, using support vector machine and nearest neighbor classifiers. An experi-mental evaluation on the chicken pieces dataset shows that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. 1

Stress-inducible phosphoprotein 1 has unique cochaperone activity during development and regulates cellular response to ischemia via the prion protein.

Stress-inducible phosphoprotein 1 (STI1) is part of the chaperone machinery, but it also functions as an extracellular ligand for the prion protein. However, the physiological relevance of these STI1 activities in vivo is unknown. Here, we show that in the absence of embryonic STI1, several Hsp90 client proteins are decreased by 50%, although Hsp90 levels are unaffected. Mutant STI1 mice showed increased caspase-3 activation and 50% impairment in cellular proliferation. Moreover, placental disruption and lack of cellular viability were linked to embryonic death by E10.5 in STI1-mutant mice. Rescue of embryonic lethality in these mutants, by transgenic expression of the STI1 gene, supported a unique role for STI1 during embryonic development. The response of STI1 haploinsufficient mice to cellular stress seemed compromised, and mutant mice showed increased vulnerability to ischemic insult. At the cellular level, ischemia increased the secretion of STI1 from wild-type astrocytes by 3-fold, whereas STI1 haploinsufficient mice secreted half as much STI1. Interesting, extracellular STI1 prevented ischemia-mediated neuronal death in a prion protein-dependent way. Our study reveals essential roles for intracellular and extracellular STI1 in cellular resilience

Regulation of Amyloid Oligomer Binding to Neurons and Neurotoxicity by the Prion Protein-mGluR5 Complex

The prion protein (PrPC) has been suggested to operate as a scaffold/receptor protein in neurons, participating in both physiological and pathological associated events. PrPC, laminin, and metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5) form a protein complex on the plasma membrane that can trigger signaling pathways involved in neuronal differentiation. PrPC and mGluR5 are co-receptors also for -amyloid oligomers (AOs) and have been shown to modulate toxicity and neuronal death in Alzheimer\u27s disease. In the present work, we addressed the potential crosstalk between these two signaling pathways, laminin-PrPC-mGluR5 or AO-PrPC-mGluR5, as well as their interplay. Herein, we demonstrated that an existing complex containing PrPC-mGluR5 has an important role in AO binding and activity in neurons. A peptide mimicking the binding site of laminin onto PrPC (Ln-1) binds to PrPC and induces intracellular Ca2+ increase in neurons via the complex PrPC-mGluR5. Ln-1 promotes internalization of PrPC and mGluR5 and transiently decreases AO biding to neurons; however, the peptide does not impact AO toxicity. Given that mGluR5 is critical for toxic signaling by AOs and in prion diseases, we tested whether mGlur5 knock-out mice would be susceptible to prion infection. Our results show mild, but significant, effects on disease progression, without affecting survival of mice after infection. These results suggest that PrPC-mGluR5 form a functional response unit by which multiple ligands can trigger signaling. We propose that trafficking of PrPC-mGluR5 may modulate signaling intensity by different PrPC ligands

A single-pot template reaction towards a manganese-based T1 contrast agent

Manganese-based contrast agents (MnCAs) have emerged as suitable alternatives to gadolinium-based contrast agents (GdCAs). However, due to their kinetic lability and laborious synthetic procedures, only a few MnCAs have found clinical MRI application. In this work, we have employed a highly innovative single-pot template synthetic strategy to develop a MnCA, MnL Me, and studied the most important physicochemical properties in vitro. MnL Me displays optimized r 1 relaxivities at both medium (20 and 64 MHz) and high magnetic fields (300 and 400 MHz) and an enhanced r 1 b=21.1 mM −1 s −1 (20 MHz, 298 K, pH 7.4) upon binding to BSA (K a=4.2×10 3 M −1). In vivo studies show that MnL Me is cleared intact into the bladder through renal excretion and has a prolonged blood half-life compared to the commercial GdCA Magnevist. MnL Me shows great promise as a novel MRI contrast agent